Yes, I think it is hard to give a cut and dried answer because, particularly in Honduras and Guatemala, less so in El Salvador, the organized crime has penetrated the state so deeply it's often hard to distinguish whether violence is what you might call political violence, or common crime. This was starkly revealed by the investigations that CICIG has carried out in Guatemala, where we discovered that the running of the organized crime networks went all the way up to the president. Often security forces are involved. High-level officers within the military in Guatemala, for example, have been involved in commanding the street gangs that carry out what seems to be common crime. It's very difficult to disentangle common crime from political or state violence.
On December 4th, 2018. See this statement in context.